Ancient Aliens Debunked is a 3 hour refutation of the theories proposed on the History Channel series Ancient Aliens. It is essentially a point by point critique of the “ancient astronaut theory” which has been proposed by people like Erich von Däniken and Zecharia Sitchin as well as many others.

The film covers topics like ancient building sites: Puma Punku, The Pyramids, Baalbek, Incan sites, And Easter Island.

Ancient artifacts: Pacal’s rocket, the Nazca lines, the Tolima “fighter jets”, the Egyptian “light bulb”, Ufo’s in ancient art, and the crystal skulls.

Ancient text issues: Ezekiel’s wheel, Ancient nuclear warfare, Vimana’s, the Anunnaki, and the Nephilim.

All the claims are sourced at the website. It was produced by Chris White and includes commentary from Dr. Michael Hesier.

It is distributed for free on the internet and is a completely non-profit project. Viewers are encouraged to share, and burn copies to DVD, as long as they do not profit from its distribution.

Thoroughly referenced and worth watching, even though it’s three hours long. Hat tip to Skeptic.com for pointing out its existence.

We’ve long understood black holes to be the points at which the universe as we know it comes to an end. Often billions of times more massive than the Sun, they lurk in the inner sanctum of almost every galaxy of stars in the universe. They’re mysterious chasms so destructive and unforgiving that not even light can escape their deadly wrath.

Recent research, however, has led to a cascade of new discoveries that have revealed an entirely different side to black holes. As the astrophysicist Caleb Scharf reveals in Gravity’s Engines, these chasms in space-time don’t just vacuum up everything that comes near them; they also spit out huge beams and clouds of matter. Black holes blow bubbles.

With clarity and keen intellect, Scharf masterfully explains how these bubbles profoundly rearrange the cosmos around them. Engaging with our deepest questions about the universe, he takes us on an intimate journey through the endlessly colorful place we call our galaxy and reminds us that the Milky Way sits in a special place in the cosmic zoo—a “sweet spot” of properties. Is it coincidental that we find ourselves here at this place and time? Could there be a deeper connection between the nature of black holes and their role in the universe and the phenomenon of life? We are, after all, made of the stuff of stars.

In logic and rhetoric, a fallacy is usually an improper argumentation in reasoning often resulting in a misconception or presumption. Literally, a fallacy is “an error in reasoning that renders an argument logically invalid”. By accident or design, fallacies may exploit emotional triggers in the listener or participant (appeal to emotion), or take advantage of social relationships between people (e.g. argument from authority). Fallacious arguments are often structured using rhetorical patterns that obscure any logical argument.

Though an argument is not “logically valid”, it is not necessarily the case that the conclusion is incorrect. It simply means that the conclusion cannot be arrived at using that argument. (…)

The nice poster above is from yet another website that explains the most common logical fallacies. Other excellent sites with information on, and explanations of, logical fallacies are this one, this one, and finally this one.

It may take several readings of those sites to become familiar with the specifics of these fallacies, but the result is being able to recognize them in discussions when they occur, as well as knowing how to counter them, if needed.

One index [of US decline] is vetoes at the United Nations. Until the mid-’60s the world was so much under US control that the US didn’t veto a single resolution at the Security Council. Since the mid-’60s the United States is far in the lead in vetoing Security Council resolutions. Britain, which is a client state, is second. Nobody else is close. That’s a reflection of the decline in capacity and power, meaning ability to influence and control.

Noam Chomsky

This is an analysis of ‘the culture of surveillance’ by the director of the Surveillance Studies Centre at Queen’s University in Canada, Dr David Lyon. He’s very good on the strength of what he describes as the cooperation between surveillance and the surveilled!

There’s a grudging but inevitable acceptance of what happens now in surveillance through government, policing, intelligence and commerce but it’s also now hardwired into streets, smart phones and the internet. And we’re absolutely complicit with our huge uptake of social media. Lyon describes this as the “democratisation of surveillance”.

He speaks here at the University of Sydney.

Length: 48 minutes 56 seconds.

Related: Can social media detect the changes in public mood?

On Spiritualized’s seventh album, Sweet Heart Sweet Light (out April 17), Pierce sounds more inspired than ever by his own looming mortality. This, after all, is a guy who nearly died of double-pneumonia in 2005, and who spent months mixing this new record while taking chemotherapy for degenerative liver disease. For all the brooding rock ‘n’ roll swagger of “I Am What I Am,” and for all the chugging grandiosity of the nine-minute single “Hey Jane,” the most indelible moments on Sweet Heart Sweet Light are those in which Pierce lays his soul bare and pleads for something beyond his reach.

Jason Pierce (a.k.a. J. Spaceman)

Time travel makes great science fiction, but can it really be done? Travel into the future is already a reality, but visiting the past is a much tougher proposition, and may require fantastic resources such as a wormhole in space. Nevertheless, if going back in time is allowed, even in principle, then what about all those paradoxes that make time travel stories so intriguing?

Paul Davies is a physicist, cosmologist and astrobiologist at Arizona State University, where is Director of the Beyond Center for Fundamental Concepts in Science. He is the author of many books, including “How to Build a Time Machine” and, most recently, “The Eerie Silence: are we alone in the universe?”

Dyson’s account of the origins of modern computing, both historic and prophetic, sheds important new light on how the digital universe exploded in the aftermath of World War II. The proliferation of both codes and machines was paralleled by two historic developments: the decoding of self-replicating sequences in biology and the invention of the hydrogen bomb. It’s no coincidence that the most destructive and the most constructive of human inventions appeared at exactly the same time.

How did code take over the world? In retracing how Alan Turing’s one-dimensional model became John von Neumann’s two-dimensional implementation, Turing’s Cathedral offers a series of provocative suggestions as to where the digital universe, now fully three-dimensional, may be heading next.

There’s a similar Google Tech Talk from 2008.
Update20110501: C-SPAN Book talk from the Computer History Museum (83:35)

The other day Psychology Today‘s Marc Bekoff pointed out a fascinating documentary on speciesism called The Superior Human?

Speciesism, as defined by Wikipedia, is the assigning of different values or rights to beings on the basis of their species membership. It’s a behaviour or ideology which, in all probability, is used only by the human animal, both versus other species of organisms as well as with (undesirable) members within its own species.

Speakers featured in the documentary are Dr. Bernard Rollin, Gary Yourofsky, Dr. Richard Ryder and Dr. Steven Best. It is narrated by Dr. Nick Gylaw.

Length: 73 minutes.

WHAT IS YOUR FAVORITE DEEP, ELEGANT, OR BEAUTIFUL EXPLANATION?

Scientists’ greatest pleasure comes from theories that derive the solution to some deep puzzle from a small set of simple principles in a surprising way. These explanations are called “beautiful” or “elegant”. Historical examples are Kepler’s explanation of complex planetary motions as simple ellipses, Bohr’s explanation of the periodic table of the elements in terms of electron shells, and Watson and Crick’s double helix. Einstein famously said that he did not need experimental confirmation of his general theory of relativity because it “was so beautiful it had to be true.”

Since this question is about explanation, answers may embrace scientific thinking in the broadest sense: as the most reliable way of gaining knowledge about anything, including other fields of inquiry such as philosophy, mathematics, economics, history, political theory, literary theory, or the human spirit. The only requirement is that some simple and non-obvious idea explain some diverse and complicated set of phenomena.

Read the 192 responses totaling 128500 words…

Al Jazeera English: Al Jazeera top 10 2011
Android Police: All Android Police App Roundups From 2011 + Bonus: Tablet Apps
Big Think: 2011, The Year in Ideas
Bing: The Top 2011 Searches from Bing: A Year of Breakthroughs and Heartbreaks
CBC News: YouTube taps Maria Aragon, talking dog as top 2011 videos
Discover: Top 100 Stories of 2011
The Daily Climate: Climate coverage down again in 2011
Forbes: MF Global, American Airlines Top 2011′s Biggest Bankruptcies
Forbes/David DiSalvo: Ten Brain Science Studies from 2011 Worth Talking Abouts
ghacks: The Best Windows Software of 2011
The Globe and Mail: The Globe 100: The very best books of 2011
The Guardian/Charlie Brooker: A guide to the buzzwords of 2011
The Guardian: 2011: the year in data, journalism (and charts)
The Guardian: A dictionary of 2011
The Guardian: Bestselling books of 2011
IMDB: Most Popular Feature Films Released In 2011
Inside Social Games: Facebook Announces “Top” 2011 Games
MetaCritic: 25 Best PC Games
NatGeo: Ten Weirdest Life-forms of 2011: Editors’ Picks
TheNextWeb: Nielsen Reveals Top Digital Brands of 2011
NME: 2011 Reviewed – The Best Of Everything
NPR: Music And The Big Idea: The Top 5 Concept Albums Of 2011
NPR Music: Favorite New Artists Of 2011 with tracks to download
Paste Music: The 20 Best Cover Songs of 2011
Popular Science/MSNBC: 10 top inventions for 2011
Psychology Today/David DiSalvo: Ten Impressive Psychology Studies from 2011
Reuters: Whale sperm, orgasmic feet top 2011 bad science list
SciAm: The Top 10 Science Stories of 2011
SciAm: Duh! 11 Obvious Science Findings of 2011
Space.com: Year in Review: 2011 in Space Exploration
SPIN: SPIN’s 50 Best Albums of 2011
TheStar: The ABCs of 2011’s natural disasters
TheStar: Justin Bieber, Lady Gaga top 2011 Twitter trends
Vancouver Sun: Layton’s death, Stanley cup riot among top 2011 Canadian news stories
Wikipedia: 2011 in film
Wired: Best of 2011: Pop Culture’s Tastiest Bits

More to follow through updates…

The album has generally garnered critical acclaim as well as PJ Harvey’s second Mercury Prize. Recorded in a 19th Century church in Dorset with long time collaborator Flood who co-produced the album with PJ Harvey, John Parish and Mick Harvey. Let England Shake was also mixed by Flood.

It was also accompanied by twelve videos for all the songs which were made by photographer and filmmaker Seamus Murphy. The playlist below contains all those videos in the order in which the songs appear on the album.

The songs are, in order (the links open up the lyrics for each song from pjharvey.net):

Let England Shake
The Last Living Rose
The Glorious Land
The Words That Maketh Murder
All And Everyone
On Battleship Hill
England
In The Dark Places
Bitter Branches
Hanging In The Wire
Written On The Forehead
The Colour Of The Earth

The titles in bold above were released as singles and contained the ‘B-sides’ The Nightingale and The Guns Called Me Back Again respectively.

More: Interview video (The Guardian)

We used to think that information is power and that the personal computer enabled lives. But, according to Jaron Lanier, things changed about ten years ago. He cites Apple, Google, and Walmart as some of the reasons.

In a freewheeling hour-long conversation, Lanier touches on, and goes beyond the themes he launched in his influential 2006 Edge essay “Digital Maoism: The Hazards of the New Online Collectivism.” What he terms “The Local-Global Flip” might be better expressed as “The Lanier Effect“.

Some excerpts from the transcript:

“The Apple idea is that instead of the personal computer model where people own their own information, and everybody can be a creator as well as a consumer, we’re moving towards this iPad, iPhone model where it’s not as adequate for media creation as the real media creation tools, and even though you can become a seller over the network, you have to pass through Apple’s gate to accept what you do, and your chances of doing well are very small, and it’s not a person to person thing, it’s a business through a hub, through Apple to others, and it doesn’t create a middle class, it creates a new kind of upper class. … Google has done something that might even be more destructive of the middle class, which is they’ve said, “Well, since Moore’s law makes computation really cheap, let’s just give away the computation, but keep the data.” And that’s a disaster.

… If we enter into the kind of world that Google likes, the world that Google wants, it’s a world where information is copied so much on the Internet that nobody knows where it came from anymore, so there can’t be any rights of authorship. However, you need a big search engine to even figure out what it is or find it. They want a lot of chaos that they can have an ability to undo. … when you have copying on a network, you throw out information because you lose the provenance, and then you need a search engine to figure it out again. That’s part of why Google can exist. Ah, the perversity of it all just gets to me.

… What Wal-Mart recognized is that information is power, and by using network information, you could consolidate extraordinary power, and so have information about what could be made where, when, what could be moved where, when, who would buy what, when for how much? By coalescing all of that, and reducing the unknowns, they were able to globalize their point of view so they were no longer a local player, but they essentially became their own market, and that’s what information can do. The use of networks can turn you from a local player in a larger system into your own global system.

… The reason this breaks is that there’s a local-global flip that happens. When you start to use an information network to concentrate information and therefore power, you benefit from a first arrival effect, and from some other common network effects that make it very hard for other people to come and grab your position. And this gets a little detailed, but it was very hard for somebody else to copy Wal-Mart once Wal-Mart had gathered all the information, because once they have the whole world aligned by the information in their server, they created essentially an expense or a risk for anybody to jump out of that system. That was very hard. … In a similar way, once you are a customer of Google’s ad network, the moment that you stop bidding for your keyword, you’re guaranteeing that your closest competitor will get it. It’s no longer just, “Well, I don’t know if I want this slot in the abstract, and who knows if a competitor or some entirely unrelated party will get it.” Instead, you have to hold on to your ground because suddenly every decision becomes strategic for you, and immediately. It creates a new kind of glue, or a new kind of stickiness.

… It can become such a bizarre system. What you have now is a system in which the Internet user becomes the product that is being sold to others, and what the product is, is the ability to be manipulated. It’s an anti-liberty system, and I know that the rhetoric around it is very contrary to that.

Visit the Edge site to read a response by Douglas Rushkoff.
Rushkoff also has a related piece at CNN: Are jobs obsolete?

“The Theory That Would Not Die: How Bayes’ Rule Cracked the Enigma Code, Hunted Down Russian Submarines, and Emerged Triumphant from Two Centuries of Controversy”

Bayes‘ rule appears to be a straightforward, one-line theorem: by updating our initial beliefs with objective new information, we get a new and improved belief. To its adherents, it is an elegant statement about learning from experience. To its opponents, it is subjectivity run amok.

In the first-ever account of Bayes’ rule for general readers, Sharon Bertsch McGrayne explores this controversial theorem and the human obsessions surrounding it. She traces its discovery by an amateur mathematician in the 1740s through its development into roughly its modern form by French scientist Pierre Simon Laplace. She reveals why respected statisticians rendered it professionally taboo for 150 years—at the same time that practitioners relied on it to solve crises involving great uncertainty and scanty information, even breaking Germany’s Enigma code during World War II, and explains how the advent of off-the-shelf computer technology in the 1980s proved to be a game-changer. Today, Bayes’ rule is used everywhere from DNA de-coding to Homeland Security.

Sharon Bertsch McGrayne is the author of numerous books, including Nobel Prize Women in Science: Their Lives, Struggles, and Momentous Discoveries and Prometheans in the Lab: Chemistry and the Making of the Modern World. She is a prize-winning former reporter for Scripps-Howard, Gannett, Crain’s, and other newspapers and has spoken at many scientific conferences, national laboratories, and universities in the United States and abroad. She lives in Seattle with her husband, George F. Bertsch, professor of physics at the University of Washington.

Also see John Allen Paulos’ review of the book in The New York Times.
To get a great intro on the Bayes Theorem read Elizier Yudkowsky’s An Intuitive Explanation of Bayes’ Theorem.
Finally, there’s a visual introduction to Bayes’ Theorem by Oscar Bonilla.

The wartime memoirs of Charles de Gaulle open with a celebrated evocation of his native land: “a certain idea of France”. The words express the widely-held view of the nation as the most significant focus and resonant form of collective human identity, the end point to which the whole of history was inexorably tending, initially in Europe, and eventually throughout the whole world.

In the course of his lecture at Melbourne University’s Festival of Ideas, British historian David Cannadine looks at the evidence for such a proposition and the evidence against. He also explores the part historians themselves have played in the creation and the undermining of national identities. Will the notion of the nation survive in an increasingly globalised world where boundaries are more porous and less defined than ever before?

Sir David Cannadine is the Whitney J Oates Senior Research Scholar within the Council of the Humanities at Princeton University. He is also a history lecturer and author working within the university. Cannadine is the author of twelve books, including “The Decline and Fall of the British Aristocracy”, “Ornamentalism: How the British Saw Their Empire”, “Mellon: An American Life” and “Making History Now and Then”.

Marc Kaufman visits Google’s San Francisco office to present his book “First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth“. This event took place on May 27, 2011, as part of the Authors@Google series.

In his riveting, game-changing book First Contact: Scientific Breakthroughs in the Hunt for Life Beyond Earth Marc Kaufman, The Washington Post science and space reporter, tells the incredible true story of science’s search for the beginnings of life on Earth and the likelihood of it existing elsewhere in our universe. He has received amazing praise, a sampling is below, and the book is being embraced by the science community from NASA to the Smithsonian and the Natural History Museum.

For decades, researchers assumed that the genesis of life was too delicate a process to exist anywhere other than Earth. But recent discoveries from microbes living in unimaginably inhospitable environments to new extra-solar planets point towards a day when the existence of extraterrestrial life will be confirmed. Kaufman takes readers around the globe, into space, and miles below Earth’s surface to show how the search for life on other planets is changing the way humans think about their own history, what it means to be human, and what, exactly, life is. It is a complicated quest made simple: First Contact is the first book to bring together cutting-edge developments across the many branches of science, from microbiology to geochemistry, physics, and astronomy, that are racing to verify what was once deemed impossible. Kaufman demystifies the rigorous science and advanced technology that is edging ever closer to the most important scientific discovery of our time.

Also see a related SETI Talk and panel discussion which features Kaufman, as well as Jill Tarter, Seth Shostak and Frank Drake:

Finally, you can check out Kaufman’s website.

Palestinian doctor Izzeldin Abuelaish‘s three daughters were killed by an Israeli rocket yet he vowed not to succumb to bitterness and hate, even as he poured out his grief live on an Israeli television program. He tells his incredible story in his book, “I Shall Not Hate: A Gaza Doctor’s Journey on the Road to Peace and Human Dignity“.

At this Sydney Writers Festival session, he’s speaking with magazine journalist David Leser.

Izzeldin Abuelaish is a Palestinian doctor and infertility expert who was born and raised in the Jabalia refugee camp in the Gaza Strip. He trained in Egypt, London, Israel, Italy, Belgium and the US, and spent most of his working life working in Israel. Abuelaish worked as a researcher at the Gerner Institute at Sheba Hospital in Tel Aviv. He now lives with his remaining family in Toronto.

David Leser has been a journalist for 32 years, working as a feature writer in North America, the Middle East, Asia and Australia. He has been nominated four times for the Walkley Award, winning it in 1999. He has won the Magazine Publishers Association award for feature writing three times. Since 2000 he has been writer-at-large for the ‘Australian Women’s Weekly’. He is the author of four books.

Length: 53 minutes 48 seconds

Mary Catherine Bateson is a cultural anthropologist now 71, the daughter of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson.

Her famed 1989 book “Composing a Life” showed how women were learning to treat their necessarily fragmented careers as a coherent improvisational art form. Her new book is titled “Composing a Further Life: The Age of Active Wisdom“.

We’re not just living longer, we’re thriving longer, Bateson says, but so far we seem to be thinking shorter. Aging societies the world over can benefit from increased longevity because human lives have added a new stage, what Bateson calls “Adulthood II: the age of active wisdom”. People of grandparent age, finding themselves with more energy and health than obsolete stereotypes had led them to expect, are seeing their lives whole and the world whole and taking on radically new activities in light of that perspective. These older adults have the potential to bring a longer perspective to decision-making that affects the future.

Mary Catherine Bateson is a writer and cultural anthropologist who divides her time between New Hampshire and Massachusetts. She has written and co-authored many books and articles, and lectures across the US and abroad and has taught at Harvard, Northeastern University, Amherst College, Spelman College and abroad in the Philippines and in Iran. In 2004, she retired from her position as Clarence J. Robinson Professor in Anthropology and English at George Mason University, and is now Professor Emerita. Her books in print include “Composing a Life”, “Our Own Metaphor” and “Peripheral Visions”, as well as a memoir, “With a Daughter’s Eye: A Memoir of Margaret Mead and Gregory Bateson”.

Stewart Brand is an American writer, best known as editor of the Whole Earth Catalogue. He founded a number of organizations including The WELL, the Global Business Network, and the Long Now Foundation. He is the author of several books, most recently “Whole Earth Discipline: An Eco-Pragmatist Manifesto”.

Length: 88 minutes 31 seconds

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosophy professors Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Kelly to discuss their book, “All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age.”

Drawing on their reading of Western classics, Dreyfus and Kelly analyze how different epochs offered unique answers to the question of what is sacred and what can provide meaning for human existence.

They explore the examples of Homer, Jesus, and Melville to highlight differing paradigms of culture practice. Dreyfus and Kelly then trace the transition to the secular age in which nihilism prevails.

They conclude by identifying how a sense of meaning emerges from heroism, athletics, and craftsmanship.

The above playlist (of two videos) also has an episode of the same programme from 2006 that features Hubert Dreyfus discussing “Meaning, Relevance, and the Limits of Technology”:

Host Harry Kreisler welcomes philosopher Hubert Dreyfus for a discussion of why machines cannot become human. In their discussion, they talk about the role of philosophy in clarifying what it means to be human.

Also see Sean Kelly’s contribution to The New York Times’ philosophy blog The Stone.